Image CGI with R

I received an email recently with a question about using R in the common gateway interface (CGI) framework to create and pass image data to the web browser. I posted to stackoverflow about this some time ago, but had forgotten the details. The trouble is that R's graphics devices only write image data to file, rather than to a buffer or R connection. Hence, when passing image data via CGI, it is necessary to write an intermediary image file, read the file, and then output the data to STDOUT. Unfortunately, R will not allow you to write binary data to STDOUT (for example, try writeBin(as.raw("0xFF"), stdout()). So, this becomes even more complicated! One solution is to open a (binary) pipe connection to the Linux cat command, which sends it's output to STDOUT, and write the image data to the pipe connection. Of course, this is a platform dependent solution. Below is a CGI script that implements this: